Does anybody here have any experience with SEASR, Meandre, and CGI? Specifically, I want to know if it is possible call a SEASR "flow" from a CGI script.
As you may or may not know SEASR is a pretty cool tool for doing various textual analysis. [1]. Using a browser-based GUI, a person can stitch together all sorts of functions to do things like get input, read data from a file system, parse text with things like parts-of-speach tools, tabulate the results, feed them to a visualization, and return an image. The underlying server software which does all the work -- Meandre -- is Web services-based and (apparently) relies heavily on RDF. [2]
The SEASR/Meandre combination seems to be designed to work on an individual's desktop, not necessarily from a server. Download software, start Meandre, open connection to localhost, download components, write programs (called "flows"), run flows, get output. All of this is well and good, but I would like to create a more Web-based interface to these "flows" as opposed to a localhost, browser-based interface.
In other words, I would like to a write a (Perl) script that gets input from an HTML form, sends the input along to a flow saved in Meandre, has the result returned to the script, and then passes the result back to the browser. This way the wonderful functionality of SEASR/Meandre could be used by a much wider audience of students and researchers. If I were able to implement this idea, then I could create all sorts of "kewl" URLs returning interesting information about all sorts of texts.
Do you know how to write a CGI script that calls SEASR/Meandre flows?
[1] SEASR - http://seasr.org/
[2] Meandre - http://seasr.org/meandre/
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Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
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